Week 5: Gathering Days

How can I casually write a post about this week’s materials when engaging with them has created seismic shifts, gargantuan epiphanies, and created a rawness that literally had me shaking?!?!?! Nothing has changed, and yet, everything has changed. I don't yet have the words (perhaps there are no words?) to express the changes, but I am different.

I know that Gathering Days is named for the time folx physically coming together at seminary, but having never experienced that, Gathering Days has become a liminal time when so much of my learning and growth becomes a “gathering” of the concepts and learning that shifts within me. It is like each class is a seed and I never know when the raw, green shoots are going to pop though the soil.

While going through the material this week for Storytelling and Narrative Justice, I could not help but imagine how different engaging with the concepts would be if my cohorts and I were all in a room together. Performing arts got long-covid, and I am just now taking stock of the symptoms. I look forward to a time when we can share stories in person.

This week's focus was on "practiced vulnerability," as introduced in Tami Spry's Body, Paper, Stage. For me, the crux of Spry’s work is how “performative autoethnography is located in the intersections of lived experience and larger social issues, constructing meaning from these

intersections.” (Spry, p. 152)

A zoom with Moose.

All week, the idea that “we cannot make meaning alone” (Spry, p. 54) has rattled around in my heart. While I loved Levins Morales’ definition of storytelling as “a basic human activity, with which we simultaneously make and understand the world and our place in it,” (Levins Morales, p. 115) it really hit home this week that that storytelling process is always communal. That is why Conquergood (kind of a jarring last name in spaces that seek to decolonize) makes the argument that “performance is a moral act.” (Spry, p. 73) Without the interconnectedness of narrative that is based in both agency and accountability, it is no longer communal meaning making. In fact, I think we could argue that without agency and accountability, narrative can become an oppressive, manipulative tool. That is what happens when Levins Morales says that “[a]ll peoples under attack learn the languages of those who can do us harm,” because some stories are meant to gaslight, harm, and control. I have been pondering whether that misuse of power is weakened when “the body is perceived as the central component in knowledge rather than a disembodied ‘mind?’” (Spry, pp.72-3) Embodiment is key. Even though Spry did not connect these concepts, I feel the concept of “practiced vulnerability” shares an interdependence with the idea of a “contagious desire for hope that moves us through grief.” (Spry, p. 67)